I sometimes get the question whether my book "Running IPv6" is still current. Since publication in 2005, not much has changed with regard to the core IPv6 protocols. I may go over what's new in this regard at some point in the future. Howevern what has changed significantly are the operating systems and other software mentioned in the book. The main things to be aware of are:

Windows:

In Windows XP, IPv6 is a protocol separate from IPv4 that must be installed explicitly. In Windows Vista and Windows 7, IPv6 support is integrated with IPv4 and enabled by default. Vista/7 use something other than the system's MAC address as the interface identifier in link local addresses and stateless autoconfiguration. Unlike XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 support DHCPv6 for both address configuration and to learn DNS resolver addresses.

MacOS:

In MacOS 10.7 Apple enabled privacy addresses with stateless autoconfig by default and added DHCPv6 support for address configuration and to learn DNS resolver addresses. Also, the system tries looks at the round trip time towards a destination over IPv6 and IPv4, and will use the protocol that has the lowest RTT. So MacOS 10.7 will often connect over IPv4 to destinations that have both IPv4 and IPv6 in the DNS. This makes things harder to debug, but the upside is that it avoids timeouts with broken IPv6 setups. As of 10.6.5 MacOS will prefer IPv4 over IPv6 if it has 6to4 connectivity.

iOS:

The iPhone, iPod touch and iPad didn't exist yet in 2005. IPv6 support was added for these devices in iOS 4 and is relatively mature in iOS 5, with stateless autoconfig and privacy addresses as well as DHCPv6 support. It looks like iOS 5 also uses the RTT-based IPv4/IPv6 selection mechanism present in MacOS 10.7.

DHCP:

The DHCP software mentioned in the book is quite bad. A much better option is the ISC dhcpd, which now also supports IPv6.

IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol
that has been developed over the past decade by the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
as a replacement for the current IP (IPv4 or TCP/IP) protocol. TCP/IP
was never designed for a network as large as today's internet. The main
problem is that the address length is only 32 bits, which allows for about
3.7 billion usable addresses. That doesn't even allow for a single address
per person on the planet. In IPv6, addresses are 128 bits in size, which
gives us more addresses than we can reasonably count (3.4x10^38).

The book was published in the second half of November 2005 by
Apress. As you can guess from the
title, it's about running IPv6. Most of the prior books about IPv6
focus on how the different parts of the protocol fit together, so they
end up describing the theory of IPv6. In my book, I wanted to show
what you can do with IPv6 today, on common operating systems
such as Windows XP, MacOS X, Linux and FreeBSD, as well as discuss
the Cisco or Juniper router configurations necessary to move IPv6
packets around the network.

An ebook version is available directly from the
Apress website. Apress ebooks are
in DRM-free PDF format for easy reading and searching. The ebook version costs $38.49.